It started out to be a routine CAT scan, which was recommended by a doctor. I had been a seizure patient for many years, and was having severe side effects from the Dilantin I was taking for this condition. Since I had never had a CAT scan, it was set up at a local hospital. My father took me that day, and when it was fininshed and we arrived back home, the phone was rining when we walked in the door. It was the hospital calling to tell me that the CAT scan didn't come out right, and would I please come back to redo it? So we hopped back in the car and went. They had me wait outside the scan room this time.

While I was waiting, a man in a white coat came and introduced himself as the head radiologist for the hospital, and began putting my scans up on the lighted platform on the wall. I could see what he was going to talk to me about before he said a word. The tumour was about as big around as the palm of my hand and was quite visible on the scan; there was no doubt it was serious.

He said it was growing and would have to come out right away, and so made arrangments for me to see the head neurosurgeon at a hospital in midtown. I went that afternoon. The surgeon looked at the scans that were sent along with me, and sad that the surgery would be scheduled for the next morning.

The tumour came out very well, and I healed great. Everything seemed to be fine, until one morning, eight months later, I awoke with a raging tempurature of 106. My parents rushed me the hospital, where it was determined that I had a staph infection from the surgery. I had been strong enough to fight it for all that time before it finally showed symptoms. So it was back into surgery, to clean out the infection in my head, and be put on the strongest antibiotics they had. My fever subsided, and I went home after abut 4 days.

The infection returned in a 3-4 months, and then again about 2 months after that. Each time, the surgical site had to be opened and cleaned. The latter time, they finally figured out that the infection was coming from the piece of skull bone they had removed and put back at the original operation, so they took it out again and it stayed out. I healed up, this time with no skull bone there. I had finally gotten rid of the infection this time.

After I got well enough, I took a job working with mentally retarded adults. After I had worked there about 10 months, I realised that I was going to have to have a plate put in for my own protection. Some of the clients I worked with were quite violent so having no protection on the back of my head was NOT a good idea. I made arrangements to have the surgery done in February of 1990.

Keep in mind that I still had alot of fluid on and in my brain tissue, so much so that my heasd still actually bulged. The doctor said he could do it without any problems at all anyway, and I believed him......(not too terribly bright). When I woke up from this operation, right away I knew things weren't right. I had such a terrible spinal fluid imbalance that I was vomiting from the time I woke up in recovery, to several days afterwards. I could hardly lift my head from the pillow, and for the most part, could not even sit up. Because I had been so sick, I developed a spinal headache that lasted about 4 weeks, and I had to lie flat for that period of time.

When I was finally able to get up, I started to deteriorate pretty fast from there. After about 3 months, I was so disoriented that I could not even get out of sight of my house because I would not be able to find my way back. I also found that I could not eat without choking, and my speech was not right...I would try to say something and it would come out backwards, or slurred to be unintelligible. I lost days at a time, semi-catatonic on the couch. I had almost no short-term memory. Simple day to day tasks I could not remember how to do....cook a simple meal, wash a dish...little thigs we take for granted were just simply gone. By the time I was deteriorating badly, I had moved from my parents, so no one knew that I was a mess for a long time. I had not been able to go back to work, and was able to get on disablity.

BTW - Dr Brilliant took one look at me when I went to find out what was happening to me and said in his best broken English, "I fixed you....you go back work now." When he left the room, his nurse had known immediately there was something wrong with me, so she set up an appointment to have me evaluated. I will always be grateful to her because if it weren't for her, I would not have even been able to get disability. I would have been totally in trouble.

Because there was no documentation at the hospital of my brain injury, I could not get rehab. Vocational Rehabilitation told me I was too far gone to warrant help from them and that I should go to the group home with the retarded people. They said I would never get past sheltered workshop for employment. It took me eight years to relearn how to do things well enough to go back to work, but no thanks to them I did go back to work. Someone gave me an old Commodore 64 computer sans instructions, so I occupied my time with it. I worked on it for hours on end and figured out how to run it.

It took about a year and a half, but looking back, I think that was the most productive year and a half I could have ever spent. I believe it helped me rebuild my brain....helped me to re-train it and to regain thought processes. I progress on to better computers, even figured out how to and ran a BBS system for 3 years.

I still have problems from the injury even now, but I have progressed enough that I work full-time, and will be starting college classes this Spring semester. Pretty good for a person who was told she would never get beyond sheltered workshop:)

Email Donna